Why go out when the best spot for a nightcap is at home? Perfect private parties are easy thanks to these distinctive bars, in homes from East Coast to West.

Chic Connecticut Colonial

Steps from Greenwich Avenue, this airy, stylish five-bedroom home features four levels of open-plan living space and modern design elements. In addition to a formal dining room with a butler’s pantry, a library, a family room with a fireplace, a gourmet kitchen, and an expansive terrace with built-in grill, it boasts a fabulous lower-level media and game room with a fireplace and a 10-seat bar with custom shelving, a sink, and two generous wine refrigerators.

Restaurants across Los Angeles are ringing in the new year with masquerade balls, live music, quiet low-lit evenings, lavish feasts, and thousands of flowing bottles of champagne. No matter your neighborhood, choice of cuisine, noise level, budget, or poison, the restaurants on this list will help you welcome 2019 with some of the finest food our culinary destinations have to offer.

Read on for the best places in L.A. to dine on New Year’s Eve and ring in 2019.

Hanukkah began at sundown on December 2nd last week. Many of us celebrated the start of the holiday by lighting candles for eight days and consuming fried foods. Lots of fried foods. Latkes are deceptively simple. For a basic, classic latke is just potatoes, onions, flour, eggs, and oil. Some of us commemorate the holiday by making latkes each evening until the 10th. And why not? I think that allows plenty of nights to experiment with different ingredients to figure out the perfect latke to your tastes. What I love most is a very herb-heavy latke. Rosemary, Thyme, Dill, Basil. You name it, and if you have it, use it. Fresh herbs add a lot of bite to this classic dish.

During Thanksgiving, even if you love to cook, sometimes you would rather spend more quality time with family and friends than in the kitchen, stressing over the internal temperature of the bird in the oven. Other times the idea of the pile of post-meal dishes feels simply like too much work. If ever there was a year to hang up the apron and pick up the phone to order a Thanksgiving feast, 2018 would be it. This year, why not celebrate the holiday in the comfort of your own home without spending all day preparing, slicing, and mixing? All of the restaurants and stores below offer holiday meals for any size party at a wide variety of price points. All you’ll have to do is heat and serve.

The Labor Day Holiday weekend saw thousands of us flock to Paramount Studios in Los Angeles to spend three glorious evenings eating, drinking, sampling and savoring from LA’s best restaurants at the Taste, the Los Angeles Times annual food festival. The Taste has become Los Angeles’s de facto, signature food and wine festival. And for good reason. At no other festival in Los Angeles will you find such an extraordinary roster of restaurants. It’s the perfect event to cross off your 2018 restaurant “must” list in one weekend.

This year’s event paid special tribute to the late, legendary Jonathan Gold. Dozens of chefs created dishes in honor of the Pulitzer Prize winning critic. What a joy to discover so many hidden gems! For those of you couldn’t make it – here are a few of the many highlights from the festival. Your next dinner reservation starts here.

Jonathan Gold has always been a big part of the food and wine festival, but this year The Taste will pay tribute to our beloved restaurant critic through special programming at each event, celebrating the life of the man whose passion for food, accessible voice and unparalleled insights won him a well-deserved Pulitzer and a permanent place in Los Angeles history. Several restaurants at this year’s #TasteLA will be serving dishes in his honor, including Faith and Flower, Herringbone, Pacific Dining Car, and Chiguacle Sabor Ancestral de Mexico.

Garlic is on its way out. Out of season, I mean. In California, it’s easy for it to seem we have a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables no matter the season because so much of what we buy at our grocery stores travels such great distances to reach us. So there’s always been a soft spot in my heart for farmers markets and organic produce sold by local and regional growers. Afterall, What small town would be complete without a weekly Farmers Market? Luckily, the east side of Los Angeles makes up several small towns (the neighborhoods feel like small towns anyway) and so it offers several farmers markets where you can find a wide variety of affordably-priced fruits, vegetables, honey, herbs, bread, flowers, vintage clothing, arts & crafts, and more.

Everyone from local families who live in the neighborhood to some of Southern California’s most respected chefs use our farmers markets as their weekly food source and walk-in pantry. And once you visit any of the markets on our list below it’s easy to see why: vine-ripened and tree-ripened local produce is way tastier than your average grocery supply, you can feel good about eliminating packaging and plastic waste, it’s amazing to know the people who grow your food by name, and so much more. It’s simply amazing to buy food from passionate people who value sustainable agricultural practices.

Below you will find the definitive list of all of Los Angeles’s east side farmers markets that specialize in every crop that’s grown seasonally around our great state of California, for every day of the week. Except for Mondays for some curious reason. That must be the day of rest for our local growers.

Toward the end of a warm late August summer day, you may find yourself in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or in the midst of a new stretch of restaurants, and the thought may occur to you: there must be some place nearby that has really great happy hour oysters. The $1 happy hour oyster in LA may be close to becoming extinct, but it’s not quite there yet. Below is the definitive list of $1 dollar or near $1 dollar happy hour oysters in Los Angeles for all your summer oyster cravings, no matter the neighborhood you may find yourself in.

After arousing suspicions for the past several years, it may be safe to call it: East LA Meets Napa Food & Wine Festival is the best food and wine festival in Los Angeles. At no other festival is there more food, more wine, music, and dancing than at AltaMed’s annual downtown Los Angeles bash. Find your new favorite bottle of wine and where you should book your next dinner reservation inside.

Hollywood’s best restaurants don’t always have a gimmick, but when they do they resemble a summer blockbuster more than a favorite film you decide to return to again and again. The latest en vogue tendency for Hollywood restaurants is actually no gimmick at all, but instead a worthy reclaiming and reimagining of urban blight: Hollywood’s best restaurants are taking back the strip mall. The strip mall is, of course, not unique to Los Angeles at all, but it does feel like a Los Angeles signature, especially when you are driving down Hollywood’s most famous streets like Hollywood, Sunset, Melrose, and Santa Monica.

Of course, not all of Summer 2018’s essential Hollywood restaurants are packed like sardines inside a strip mall, many are sprawling and grand architectural and artistic works in themselves, Provençal cafés, or sleek and modern spots with menus to match. Here, we take a look at 14 of Hollywood’s best restaurants including Baroo, Chi SPACCA, Gwen, Kali, Trois Mec, and more.

Also, for the purpose of this article – let’s define exactly where Hollywood is. We only looked at restaurants above Melrose, below Franklin West of the 101, and east of Fairfax. Give or take a block or two. If we’ve left any incredible restaurant out, please let us know! We love trying at least one new restaurant each week.